Kolkata: Putting to rest all speculations, Bengal industries minister Nirupam Sen on Wednesday announced that the Great Eastern Hotel would be sold to Bharat Hotels for Rs 52 crore.
Sen said, Bharat Hotels, which was the highest bidder for the 165-year old property, would invest another Rs 120 crore in refurbishing it.
Once symbolic of militant trade unionism the Great Eastern Hotel today signifies the Left's newfound love for economic reforms.
West Bengal industries minister Nirupam Sen said his government was not prejudiced by the his party?s position on Lalit Suri who is the chairman and managing director of Bharat Hotels.
Suri has been the Left?s bete noire for quite some time. Several allegations have been leveled against him since the eighties, and the CPIM had even demanded a CBI probe into his dealings for his business connections with former Prime Minister AB Vajpayee?s foster son-in-law Ranjan Bhattacharya.
The CPIM had demanded the CBI probe as recently as in July this year in connection with the sale of Juhu Centaur and Airport Centaur hotels.
Back in 1980's when Suri built the Intercontinental in Delhi, the Left had cried foul. Suri then close to Rajiv Gandhi had allegedly violated some norms.
Over a decade later in 1994 when the infamous Jharkhand Mukti Morcha bribery case broke out the CBI had among others, registered a case against Lalit Suri known to be a Congress financer then. That did not go down well with the Left.
When asked why the party had suddenly begun to see merit in Lalit Suri, the CPM's logic ran something like this ?In that case we cant do business with most businessmen for most of them evade tax and we have taken on the evaders? Dipankar Mukherjee, CPM leader, said.
"We are liberal to all industrial houses. We have not gone into the details of how industrial houses have become so rich or what they have done in the past. This is not at all our consideration," Nirupam Sen, Bengal industries minister, said.
It is ironic that the Left front government of Bengal had failed to sell the hotel to French major Accor because of resistance from its affiliated trade unions, but a decade later, it decided to transfer it to someone the CPIM has always seen as a ?bad guy? and that too at the cost of some 400 jobs.
And with that apparent infallible logic the Marxists in Kolkata led by the poster boy of economic reforms Buddhadeb Bhattacharya seem to have found the perfect remedy to revive the hotel.
(With inputs from Aniek Paul, Smitha Nair and Diptosh Majumdar)
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